Iason Chaimalas

GenAI Software Engineer @ MathWorks | UCL MEng EEE with CS

London, England, United Kingdom

About

I have lived in 5 countries spanning 3 continents - Greece, Italy, Australia, USA and the UK - where I have always adapted quickly and thrived. Working with people in a plethora of cultural and academic contexts, I have become an effective communicator, teammate and leader, as well as a very fast learner. My motivation is to make a positive change in the world through innovation and initiative! I have programming experience in Python, C, embedded systems and FPGAs, and I am eager to expand my understanding of computing from digital hardware to software!

Experience

  • MathWorks (1 yr 11 mos)
    • AI Research Engineer
      Jan 2026 - Present · 7 mos

    • Software Engineer in Engineering Development Group
      Sep 2024 - Jan 2026 · 1 yr 5 mos

  • Machine Learning Research Assistant at UCL
    Mar 2024 - May 2024 · 3 mos

    RA for the Machine Learning Research Group led by Professor Ilija Bogunovic in the UCL Department of EEE. Contributed to publication on Group-Robust Preference Optimisation for LLMs (ArXiv 2405.20304). • ML Robustness/Fairness applied to Preference Optimisation (DPO, IPO) for aligning LLMs • Experiments on synthetic bandits and real LLMs (using LoRA full-finetuning)

  • Software Engineer Intern at MathWorks
    Jun 2023 - Sep 2023 · 4 mos

  • Recommender Systems Research Intern at BBC
    Oct 2022 - Mar 2023 · 6 mos

    • Machine Learning research and data analysis on millions of real user data • Publication: "Bootstrapped Personalized Popularity for Cold Start Recommender Systems", RecSys 2023 I conducted this long-term Machine Learning project as my Year 3 UCL project in collaboration with the BBC, where I researched and proposed novel Recommender Systems to address the Cold Start problem in recommendations, using real BBC user data. I have published this novel algorithm alongside my UCL and BBC supervisors at the RecSys 2023 conference in Singapore!

  • Student Representative at UCL
    Oct 2021 - Jul 2022 · 10 mos

    As a Academic Rep for the UCL EEE Department, I represented my second-year cohort of 200+ students in frequent Student-Staff Consultative Committee (SSCC) meetings, where I assessed the student experience alongside the administrators, setting SMART action plans to effectively address issues and improve student satisfaction. Also, I participated in the proposal, organisation and advertising of a student social and networking event for all UCL EEE cohorts, which involved first-years up to Masters and PhD students with very high student turnout!